Science

Science

Difficulty: EasyResponsibilities: To identify enemies and their weaknessesAbilities: Scanning enemiesExpectations from other players: Which enemies to scan first (Captain)

Only the captain and the science officer have the ability to see the entire sector at once, and if for some reason people don't want to follow the captain, things usually come down to the science officer to step in as acting captain.

The science officer's primary duty, however, will be to lock onto targets and then scan them. Simply left click on a target and press enter to scan them. The first scan will identify the enemy's type. Scanning the same target again will reveal two additional pieces of information:

The enemy vessel's frequency status

Facts about the enemy vessel's captain

The former is used by tactical. Look at each of the bars from A to E and tell Tactical which bar is the lowest. This will let him cause additional beam damage to that target by setting his frequency to match the lowest bar. Once a target has been scanned, however, the captain can observe your scan results at any time.

The latter is used by Communications, when taunting an enemy becomes necessary. This gives the communications officer an idea as to which taunt to use against a specific enemy.

Scanning speed can be increased by requesting the captain (who will in turn request for the engineer) to divert additional power to sensors.

Your vessel will also scan any target that gets extremely close to it. Your scanning however has no range, so scan as many targets as possible (with preference to enemies your ship is about to face, obviously, or whatever the captain says to scan) and try not to sit idle.

Once all targets have been scanned, you can afford to take a breather, but don't become lazy; additional enemy contacts may appear and the captain will need your talents again.